I can still remember when we first learned to preach it.
We’d just arrived at grad school and were stretched thin by long nights, a baby boy, a budget we couldn’t possibly balance, and immaturities to boot. My wife and I had asked one of my professors for church recommendations, and he’d given us one, a still-young church plant just up the road and across the state line. Neither of us had done a lot of church “shopping,” so all the differences we noticed that Sunday morning left impressions.
For starters, the church met in a “gym-natorium” that was long on basketball hoops but decidedly short on aesthetics. (I’m not sure any of the walls were even painted.) Then there was the music, led by a pastor, written by new-to-us artists like Getty, Townend, Kauflin, and Cook, and sung — really sung — by everybody in the room, grayheads and kids raising their hands in the air. All of it was followed by a remarkable sermon — still the best I’ve heard on Ephesians 6 — and preached, we’d come to find out, by an intern. (What kind of place has interns like that?)
All of this left its mark, but what struck us most was the surprising attention the church paid to the gospel. It was like the best news they’d ever heard, like they’d just discovered it for the first time, even though so many in the room, we guessed, were already Christians. Every part of the liturgy — from the announcements to the offering to the benediction — was shot through with a celebration of what God had done for us in Jesus and a call to live in the goodness of that news. To say we were encouraged would be insufficient. We were transformed.
The Gospel for Today
We soon learned there was a name for this fresh attention to the gospel — “gospel-centered” — and that it was, in God’s mercy, sweeping through many churches at that moment. We also soon learned that “gospel-centered” was shorthand for a cluster of underemphasized and glorious realities that Christians could “preach to themselves” on Sundays and every other day. We would spend most of the next decade learning to do just that.
Maybe you know this already. Maybe you don’t. But if you’re a Christian, the gospel is for you. It’s full of good news about your past and future — and your present day-to-day life. It’s full of good news for today. And to live in the goodness of this news, there are precious truths you simply must learn to rehearse, to preach, to yourself.
Here’s how that sermon might go.
New Ability
The gospel tells us that we’ve been regenerated. That’s a big word that points to an even bigger reality: Christians — those of us united to Jesus by faith — have been given brand-new spiritual abilities, thanks to what Jesus has done for us in his death, burial, and resurrection. We have brand-new powers. Paul calls these powers “incomparably great” (Ephesians 1:19 NIV). I like to think of them as superpowers. The gospel takes skinny little Steve Rogers and turns him — you — into Captain America. The gospel takes sinners like you and me and turns us into saints.
If you’ve been joined to God’s family, if you’ve believed the gospel, then you’ve received the Spirit Jesus sent when he ascended to heaven. And because you have the Spirit, you can and will follow Jesus and please God with your life. “The righteous requirement of the law” will be “met” by those of us “who . . . live . . . according to the Spirit” (Romans 8:4 NIV). If you’re a Christian, you have God’s law written on your heart (Hebrews 8:10). What God demands, you now can do. Not yet perfectly, of course — we have to wait until we see Jesus face to face for that (1 John 3:2). But if you’re a Christian, you can and will sin less and increasingly obey more (2 Corinthians 3:18).
When we’d rehearse this one together as a church, we’d often use the words of a lovely little poem that goes like this:
Run, John, run, the law commands,
but gives us neither feet nor hands.
Far better news the gospel brings:
It bids us fly and gives us wings.
If you know and love the Lord Jesus, the gospel — Jesus’s death, burial, and resurrection — gives you wings. Satan wants you to think you’re still earthbound. Jesus, however, reminds you: it’s time to fly!
New Identity
The gospel also tells us that we’ve been justified. If you know and love the Lord Jesus, you have Jesus’s perfect life — his sin-cleansing obedience — as your own (Hebrews 5:5–10; 10:14). He’s gifted it to you. Your ledger was red as can be. Then you believed, and your debt was erased. Because of Jesus’s faithful life and death for you, you’re in the black — big time. Think Publisher’s Clearing House times infinity! If you’re connected to Jesus, you can’t out-sin his sin-covering gift. Where your sin runs deep, his gracious gift is more. It’s always more.
We call this gift “imputed,” “alien,” or simply “outside-of-us” righteousness. While Christians still sin — after all, we’re not yet fully righteous ourselves — we’ve nevertheless been declared righteous, thanks to the gift Jesus deposited in our account when we believed. Martin Luther famously captured this dual identity, describing Christians as “simultaneously righteous and sinful.” Most of us are all too aware of the latter. The gospel, however, doesn’t want us to forget the former. To glory in the former.
Back in the early 2000s, when gospel-centrality took many churches by storm, this way of thinking about the gospel led the way. Preachers and authors told us again and again and again to remember who we are in Christ. The indicative mood (“You are forgiven”) became a place many of us took fresh comfort in.
It’s a place we can still take comfort in. For those of us who know and love the Lord Jesus, the gospel gives us a new identity. Before you believed, your sin made you God’s enemy. Now that you believe, and thanks be to Christ, you are God’s forgiven son or daughter. The gospel reminds you: this is now who you are.
New Example
The gospel also tells us we have a brand-new example to follow. If you were around in the 1990s, you might remember the popular bracelet that read “WWJD” — “What Would Jesus Do?” The gospel gives us a brand-new example of what it looks like to be the kind of humans God created us to be. Jesus himself points to the goodness of this reality when he tells us, “As I have loved you, so you must love one another” (John 13:34 NIV).
When we wonder what it looks like to love God with all our heart and our neighbor as ourselves, it helps to glance at Abraham, Moses, Rahab, or any of the other faith-filled believers who’ve run this human race well to the end. But you’ll want to look at Jesus (Hebrews 12:1–2). There’s nobody else like him. He’s in a class all by himself. It’s “in his steps,” guided by his footprints, that you’ll want to walk this road of life (1 Peter 2:21).
How kind of our heavenly Father. He didn’t just call us to reflect his image to this world he’s made. He also showed us how by sending Jesus — and giving us four biographies of Jesus to read while we wait for his return.
New Sight
The gospel also gives us a brand-new way to read the Bible God has given us. Before Jesus’s death, burial, and resurrection, we’d all have been like Peter. None of us could have anticipated that God would save his people by sacrificing his Son (Mark 8:27–33). Without Jesus’s death, burial, and resurrection, we’d all have been like the blind man Jesus heals right before Peter’s confession (Mark 8:22–26). We’d have seen the biblically revealed realities not as the “people” they are but as “trees walking around.” Paul, at one point, says that the gospel reveals things that were hidden in the Old Testament (Romans 16:25–27). Only after Jesus’s resurrection are we able to see.
The resurrection, however, wasn’t enough. For us to see — really see — all that God has revealed for us in his word, God not only had to reveal Jesus to us; he had to reveal Jesus in us (Galatians 1:16).
The gospel, when believed, gloriously removes two sets of blinders from our eyes. It removes the hermeneutical blinders caused by the mysterious nature of God’s story and the moral blinders caused by the willful stubbornness of our sinful hearts (Matthew 13:15). Now, with the Spirit Jesus sends, we can and will profit from Holy Scripture. To those of us who know and love the Lord Jesus, the seals of God’s book have been broken, and its glorious treasures have been revealed (Matthew 13:52).
With God’s Spirit, we now read the Bible with the gospel at the center. We see that the story’s tension is fundamentally, if surprisingly, resolved by Jesus’s death, burial, and resurrection. We see, like never before, that the Bible’s story, begun in the Old Testament, climaxes in Jesus, continues in his church, and culminates in his return and the new creation.
The realities of the gospel shape the way we read every part of the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation. It’s a way of reading the Bible as only a Christian can.
Yours to Preach
It’s been nearly twenty years since that Sunday morning. We’re no longer in grad school. Our baby is a senior in high school, and he’s got two teenage (and precious) siblings. We’ve moved three times. And we’ve gotten older; we’re no longer the fresh-faced twentysomethings we were that day, so many Sundays ago. Much has changed. But one thing hasn’t: Not a day goes by when we don’t think about this sermon. Not a day goes by when we don’t preach its glorious realities to each other and ourselves. If anything, we know even more now than we did back then just how much we need to hear it.
If you know and love the Lord Jesus, this sermon is yours. It’s yours to preach and sing and pray and share. If you’re a Christian, then you can — you must — live in the goodness of this good news every day of your life.
Desiring God